Fullness by Liz Flaherty

I've so loved having guests every day through this season, and I'm grateful you've made them welcome. Isn't it fun reading their stories and connecting them to your own? I've been been both surprised and gratified by the reception the Window Holidays Project received. 

I've had this particular post started for days now. There is, if I'm honest about it, a bittersweetness to our Christmases anymore. Although I celebrate the birth of Jesus, and that hasn't changed--although my gratitude has grown, which is a good thing--I miss the way Christmas Days were when our kids were little. I miss the family members who aren't with us anymore. 

I miss fullness.

It's been a rough several years for most of us, hasn't it? We've dealt with Covid, with political unrest, with finding and learning to live with new normals. This is my first Christmas without the sister who was part of every day of my life until the one in April when she left us. Her daughters and grandchildren are finding their way without her. So are my brother and I and the astonishing number of people whose lives she touched. 

And there it is. Not the fact that she's gone, but the lives she touched while she was here. Loss is excruciating--a family at church and another family whose lives have touched ours are suffering that during these already emotion-packed days of the Christmas season. But before we lose, we have. Time may not heal wounds, because the scars are way too deep for that, but it gentles them. It gives us joy in memories. Laughter. Oh, yes, laughter. 

And there the fullness is. This post has been sort of...out there, hasn't it? But there's no more emotional time than this one. All of those who are dealing with loss, loneliness, or dark times, I wish you comfort and that joy and laughter will find you amid the grief. I wish you fullness. 

I'll be back a week from Saturday. Until then, enjoy the guests who will be at the Window every day through New Year's Eve. Thank you on their behalf for your support of them and of the Window Over the Sink. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Be blessed. And be nice to somebody. 

A Weird Place by Liz Flaherty

I'm late again. I doubt most people are aware of it--it's only 6:39 AM on Saturday morning. I've watched the morning sky, fed the cats, and gotten the coffeepot in the house ready for when Duane gets up. I haven't written the blog yet, although I like to have it done on Friday. I want for it to be there, ready, like the purple and pink sky and my Keurig, when I come to the office on Saturday. That hasn't worked this week.

I'm in a weird kind of place, one I imagine most people my age can identify with. I'm a septuagenarian, thank you very much. I've earned a long word for being as old as I am. I'm happy and grateful for my life. I laugh a lot and I love my family with a depth that there aren't any words long enough to describe. I am blessed in so many ways. 

And yet.

It's not much of a secret, since I talk about it all the time, that I'm a dweller. I don't get over things. It's one of those things you hope will go away with that age I was talking about, but for me it has sharpened. Instead of fading into a gentle Monet landscape, loss and grief and anger stand out like mountains on relief maps. It's only now, in these brittle days since my sister passed away, that I realize I can be grateful and happy and realize my blessings and still dwell on hurt and loss. Still wake every day with the thought that I won't see her again. 

Nancy, my sister, was big on get over it. It was how she got through things, how she survived, how she held onto happy and grateful. She was the eldest of us, however, and she was unprepared for two of our brothers to pass before her. How dared they to go out of order? We laughed when we said that, but she didn't "get over it." She mourned with a depth I didn't fully understand, even though they were my brothers, too. 

She worried about my brother and me who are still here, because she already felt betrayed by the out-of-order thing. Despite the depth of her own grief, I don't think she'd understand that I'm having trouble accepting that she's not sitting at her kitchen table anymore. She'd roll her eyes and remind me that I have everything. 

I do. And I'm grateful, happy, and blessed. But I don't have her. As wonderful as septuagenarianism is--and it truly is--it is pockmarked with those things I talked about. Loss and grief and anger all leave marks, don't they? They add substance to our lives, to who we are, but they hurt. Forever. 

I don't know how to end this, because I am indeed still in this weird place. But maybe writing about it (and making you suffer along with me) has helped. It's reminded me of the pink and purple morning sky, that I had the best sister in the world for over 70 years, and to keep laughing because joy keeps those scars of grief and loss and anger from running together and taking you over. 

I miss you every day, Nance. Love you.

That's it for now. Have a good week. Tell people you love them. Be nice to somebody. 

About Siblings by Liz Flaherty

I wrote the following column in November of 1994. I found it odd that when I went looking for it among the pre-internet clippings, it was the first one in the first binder I picked up. But maybe not odd at all.

It's flawed, for which I apologize, but it's important to me that I share it today. I hope you'll bear with me.

***

I'm writing this on my brother's birthday. He's older than me, of course. I wouldn't have mentioned it at all if he'd been younger. He has one more kid than I do. He also has completely different memories of our growing up years than I do. I'm sure he thinks his memories are different because he's old, but that isn't true.

They're different because he's wrong.

And that's one of the joys of having siblings. You always think they're wrong and they always think you're a brick shy of a load. You will scream at them and give them hard looks and tell their spouses you don't know how they can stand them day after day after day. They will scream at you and hang up loud in your ear if they think you're being stupid. (Note from Liz--this was also pre-cellphone, in case you hadn't figured that out.) You're not stupid--I know that. It's your siblings we're talking about here. You know how they are. They'll tell your parents they spoiled you rotten and that's why you're the way you are. 

You can go for years without seeing your siblings and then when you do, it's like  you saw them yesterday. You can hear one of their voices over the phone and know exactly who you're talking to even if you get your own children's voices confused.

I have four of them. They're all older than me--see, guys? I got that in there again--and they're all smarter than me. They still pick on me for childhood eccentricities I left behind 35 years ago. If we were all together and there were only four seats, I'd still be the one who sits on the floor. When I make comments, they look at my husband and say, "Is that right?" like I'm still not mature enough to be believed.

One of my brothers still calls me Yitsy, which is what I called myself before I could speak plainly. Another brother calls me Lizzie Bird.

Seriously, is this how you talk to a woman who is a grandmother?

Well, yes, if you are her brother or sister and have known her since the day you were brought home from the hospital.

Because siblings share something even spouses and children don't. They have a history that goes all the way back to the cradle. They not only know and accept the way you are, but realize why you are that way. Even as they are screaming at you, even though they may not always even like you, they will defend you to the death against any and all outsiders. They will say, "That's just the way she is," and invite no more comment. 

Then they will tell you to grow up, straighten up, act right. They will tell you growing up was rougher on them than on you and they will remember things...differently.

And maybe they're not wrong. Maybe you are.

There's another thing about sisters and brothers, a really important thing.

If I ever called any of them and said, "I need you," they would be on the way before the words were completely out of my mouth. I would do the same for them.

It's nice to know that. 

***

Nancy Dotson 
8/25/1936 - 4/13/2022

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.

And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Kahlil Gibran

At the end of the day...

I'm sorry-not sorry to repeat this yet again, but it's a favorite. And Tuesday would be my parents' anniversary. Maybe it's a favorite because it reminds me of not only the goods in a long relationship, but the bads as well--and that we can get...not over them, but through them. Thanks for reading this again. 

In 2012. I had a book out called A Soft Place to Fall, about a marriage gone wrong and how two people found ways to make it right. I still have a soft spot for that book and for long marriages. I regret that I sometimes get a little too glib when I talk about it--I make it all sound easy when it's not at all. At the end of the day, though, marriage is private and what goes on within it is not to be shared. No one really understands anyone else's. Looking back on this, my feelings toward my parents' marriage haven't changed, but I have come to realize that--at the end of that day I just mentioned--it wasn't really any of my business.

“A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' comes together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences.” ― Dave Meurer

On September 28, 1935, my parents went to a minister’s house and got married. My dad wore a double-breasted suit and my mom had on a hat. They stayed married through the rest of the Great Depression and three wars, through the births of six children and the death of one at the age of three, through failing health and the loss of all their parents and some of my father’s siblings. Dad died in 1981, Mom in 1982. They were still married.

From the viewpoint of their youngest child, who was born in their early 40s when they thought they were finished with all that, it was the marriage from hell. I never saw them as a loving couple, never saw them laugh together or show affection or even hold hands. They didn’t buy each other gifts, sit on the couch together, or bring each other cups of coffee. The only thing I was sure they shared was that—unlike my husband and me—they didn’t cancel out each other’s vote on Election Day.

“Why on earth,” I asked my sister once, “did they stay together all those years? Mom could have gone home to her family, even if she did have to take a whole litter of kids. Heaven knows Dad could have.” (He was the adored youngest son and brother—he could do no wrong.)

Nancy gave me the look all youngest siblings know, the one that says, “Are you stupid?” When you’re grown up, it replaces the look that says, “You’re a nasty little brat.” But I regress.

“Don’t you get it?” my sister asked. Her blue eyes softened. So did her voice. “They loved each other. Always. They just didn’t do it the way you wanted them to.”

Oh.

I remembered then. When they stopped for ice cream because Mom loved ice cream. How they sat at the kitchen table across from each other drinking coffee. How thin my dad got during Mom’s long illness because “I can’t eat if she can’t.” When they watched Lawrence Welk reruns together and loud because—although neither would admit it—their hearing was seriously compromised.

And the letters. The account of their courtship. We found them after Mom’s death, kept in neat stacks. They wrote each other, in those days of multiple daily mail deliveries, at least once a day and sometimes twice. When I read those letters, I cried because I’d never known the people who wrote them.

I have to admit, my parents’ lives had nothing to do with why I chose to write romantic fiction. I got my staunch belief in Happily Ever After from my own marriage, not theirs. But how you feel about things and what you know—those change over the years.

As much as I hated my parents’ marriage—and I truly did hate it—I admire how they stuck with it. I’ve never appreciated the love they had for each other, but I’ve come to understand that it never ended. I still feel sorry sometimes for the little girl I was, whose childhood was so far from storybook that she wrote her own, but I’m so grateful to have become the adult I am. The one who still writes her own stories.

But—and this is the good part—these are the things I know.

Saying “I love you” doesn’t always require words. Sometimes it’s being unable to eat because someone else isn’t. Sometimes it’s stopping for ice cream. Sometimes—and I realized this the other day when my husband and I were bellowing “Footloose” in the car—it’s hearing music the same way, regardless of how it sounds to anyone else.

Marriage is different for different people. So is love. So is Happily Ever After.

Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.

Christine, James Drury, and Me

I wrote this in October of 2014. I had  a new book out--always a good thing--but was feeling melancholy, too. I've felt that way a lot this past year, too. Makes me more grateful than ever for sisters--by birth, by marriage, and of the heart. They are precious all.

Her name was Christine Ann and she died of diphtheria when she was three, nine years before I was born. In the few pictures of her that remain, she has straight white blonde hair and sturdy legs in long cotton stockings. “I always thought she would have been big when she grew up,” my mother said. My father never talked about her. My other sister, Nancy, who was two years older than Christine, still grieves.

I was the youngest in my family. There were three brothers between my sisters and me. I was a girly girl on a farm, and I was lonely. So I thought a lot about Christine. I was convinced she would have liked me. She would have wanted to play house with me and talk about Little Women and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She’d have been a willing participant in dress-up, swinging high enough to touch that branch up there, and playing with kittens in the hay mow in the barn.

I used to pretend, when I was unhappy, that she had not died. She was not only my sister, but my imaginary friend.

For years after her death, Mom would write notes to her in her baby book. “You would be nine today…what a big girl…we miss you so much.” I used to cry over the baby book, for the sister I never knew, for Nancy who’d lost the sister she really loved, for Mom and Dad, who surely would have liked me better if they hadn’t lost her. I cried for myself, too, because I never felt I measured up to the invisible daughter-sister bar.

Years after the last time I read my mother’s notes to Christine in her baby book, someone wrote an article in RWR about wanting the heroine in books she read to be her sister. This was years before I was published, before I’d even finished the first dreadful manuscript. I don’t remember the article well enough to quote it, nor do I know who wrote it, but I knew then what kind of women would populate my stories.

They would be sisters. Even if they were only children, they would have best friends they loved like sisters. They would be flawed, often pretty but probably not beautiful. Some would be heavy, some skinny. None of them would have particularly good hair unless they had broad hips to offset it. They wouldn’t dress especially well, excel at very many things, or cry prettily. They would be neither brave nor stupid. When they sang, it would be out of tune, but they would sing anyway.

I am meandering in this post, for which I apologize, but Christine’s birthday would have been October 11 and she is on my mind a lot. I’ve only lately realized how much her brief life and too-early death had to do with me being a romance writer.

Because her story was the first one I ever made up.

She not only swung with me and read with me and played with me in the quiet of the barn, but in my imagination, I saw her as an adult whose bright blue eyes never faded, whose blonde hair never darkened. The twelve years between us would have been like nothing if she’d lived. She’d have married a man who looked like James Drury. He would have liked it if Christine’s little sister spent vacations and long weekends with them. They lived, oh, yes, happily ever after.

I’ve aged, but in my mind she has not. The tenderness, angst, and sweetness of those imaginings are as clear to me today as they were when I was a little girl missing the sister I’d never known. I still miss her, but I think I was wrong. I think I knew her after all. Happy birthday, Christine.

Once upon a time...

This was from August of 1994. The grandparents I wrote about here were born in 1869 and 1873, which sounds incredible to me now. It makes me wish I'd asked a lot more questions and written a lot more down.

Have I ever told you about my grandmother? Well, that's a silly question, when I already know I haven't, but it was a good way to give you a clue I'm going to tell you about her now.

Her name was Elvira Pontius Shafer. She died in 1957 at the age of 84. I wore

Photo by Annette Wise

my favorite blue and white dress to the funeral and sat next to my cousin Ronnie and had to be really quiet for a long time, even longer than if I'd gone to school that day.

She used to sit in her kitchen and drink coffee out of a big white cup with a long crack down the side. I asked her why she always used that cup and she said it was to save the good ones for company. Evenings, she would sit in a small rocking chair near the stove in the living room and take down her long white hair and brush it while talk and noise went on around her. She never paid any attention to me and I was pretty sure she didn't like me.

That's all I remember.

Photo by Annette Wise

But I know she and my grandfather, William Washington Shafer, had two stillborn babies and that those babies were buried in the garden. "How could they?" I demanded of the person who told the story. "How could they have done something like that? We're talking babies here, not goldfish." I don't remember the answer, but years later, my sister Nancy told me how much time Elvira had spent in her rose garden. Alone.

When Amy, Elvira and William's firstborn child, was 23, she became a statistic in the influenza epidemic of 1918. Amy was buried in the cemetery, not the garden, but I'm sure Grandma grieved for her out there with her roses.

One time when Elvira was pregnant, which she was at least 10 times, a fire broke out in the house. According to pictures and to my memory, Elvira was a skinny little thing, but when the fire erupted, she picked up the sewing machine and carried it downstairs and out of the house. In those days, sewing machines were big things in heavy wooden cabinets with a treadle attached underneath. We have one of them sitting in the hallway downstairs. I, who haven't been pregnant in 20 years and who am by no one's measure a skinny little thing, can lift one end of it.

I know that when William went blind and spent most of the rest of his days on the couch in front of the big living room window, it didn't make any difference to her. They still laughed and had a good time until he died in 1952, when they'd been married something like 58 years.

That's what I know about my grandmother. It's not much, but I'm glad I know it. I'm glad I listened when aunts told stories in my hearing. What I know has taught me a couple of things that I'm sure she never intended. One, that I hope none of my grandkids ever think for one tiny minute that I don't like them. Two, that I never save anything for company, because there's no one more important than family.

Talking about Elvira makes me think of my roots, something I never gave much thought until recently. It makes me wonder if she's the reason I think it's so very important for women to be strong--like she was. Strong enough to survive the most grievous emotional assaults and still laugh with the man she loved. Strong enough to carry a sewing machine down the stairs.

So, if you get a chance, take a long hard look at the pages of your past. Listen to the stories told by those who remember things you can't. Then tell the stories again so that they live on. Tales of the past embroider the fabric of our lives today and lend them a little richness they wouldn't have had otherwise.

Thanks for listening. Pass it on.